Contemporary Challenges to Jesus

Contemporary Challenges to
Jesus (2 of 3)

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Dr. Mark Bailey: Welcome
to DTS
Dialogue: Issues of God in Culture. I am your host, Dr.
Mark Bailey, and I have the privilege of serving as president of Dallas
Theological Seminary. Today we have the opportunity to discuss
contemporary challenges to the biblical accounts of Jesus.

Now a question. Darrell, you have used extra-biblical materials to
argue for Jewish belief in a physical resurrection. For those of us who
are biblical Christians, for us the Bible is enough. At the same time,
there is a whole realm of study beyond the Scriptures that are
important for background to the Scriptures. Tell us some of that
argumentation and that historical work that you have been working on.

Dr. Darrell Bock: Well, the
key here is to appreciate two things. One is that not everyone shares
the high regard of the Bible that we Christians have. And there really
are two ways to deal with this.

One is to absolutely insist on the position that the Bible is the Word
of God and you got to come to grips with it, because it's true. And
that's the way we normally do our kind of apologetics work is what we
call it.

But then the second way to do it is to engage in what I would consider
to be kind of a genuine dialogue with someone, in which you say, "All
right, I'm even going to think about your own presuppositions and try
and make the case without insisting that you agree with where I'm
coming from in the Bible. And I still think I can do that."

And so the beauty of this Jewish background is it shows that there is a
belief in physical resurrection in Judaism. Now in fact, in the two
centuries before the time of Christ there was a little bit of
discussion among certain Jewish groups about what they thought about
the afterlife. The Sadducees are known for not believing in a
resurrection.

There are some texts in Jubilees that suggest that they had a Greek
view of some aspects of resurrection: the idea that your soul goes up
to heaven, but there isn't a physical dimension to it. But then there
are texts like Second and Fourth Maccabees in which a physical part of
the resurrection is very much a part of the story.

There is a very poignant story in Second Maccabees seven where seven
sons are being executed one at a time in front of their mother for
keeping the law, for refusing to violate the law and refusing to eat
pigs. And as they go in turn, one at a time, when they come to brother
number three in the list, he sticks out his tongue and he sticks out
his hands and he basically says, "You can take these, because one day
God will give them back to me."

Now that's a pretty clear picture of a physical resurrection and his
willingness to face death because he believes in a physical
resurrection for himself.

Well this is the view that fed into Pharisaism, which fed into Paul's
view of resurrection, so that when he sees a resurrected Jesus, he gets
a confirmation that this physical aspect of resurrection is what's
going on. And he goes out and teaches and preaches it. And so this
linkage between Christian faith and its roots in Judaism is often very,
very helpful in thinking through some of the things that we see in the
Bible -- and also in some cases refuting the idea that a concept, which
can be conceived of in a variety of ways, can take on a different form
than in some cases what the church has taught.

And when you appeal to this literature, you know, you don't have to go
through the fights of, "Well, the reason you are citing that text is
because you believe it is the Word of God and I don't believe that so I
don't have to accept that testimony."

No, it's a straightforward historical argument that anyone working with
historical texts about what people in the period believed would have to
come to grips with.

Mark: Maccabees, Jubilees --
that comes out of what body of literature?

Darrell: That
comes out of what's called the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, which is a
collection of Jewish writings that never obtained any thought of being
Old Testament Scripture but were still respected theological writings
of their time.

Often when I teach this stuff in class -- and I'm talking about the Old
Testament Apocrypha, the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha -- I say, "Now,
how many of you -- and don't get sensitive here -- but how many of you
if we were to take the writings of Dr. Walvoord or Dr. Chafer or Dr.
Pentecost would say that you are reading Scripture?"

No hands go up. And I tell them if someone's hand goes up, I have
someone else they can see. And I say, "Yet you read this material
because you recognize that it has something to contribute to your
theological understanding, and it's good theological reflection."

And I said, "That's how this ancient material worked. It isn't
necessarily 100% true all the time, but it does give you very much an
indication about what people were thinking at the time." It would be a
little bit like trying to study any doctrine here on our campus and not
read some of the faculty who were authors on those topics. The more
exposure you had to them, the more you would understand what's going on
here. And it's the same kind of thing in the first century with these
writings.

Mark: Great. I just didn't
want our listeners to go to the local bookstore, look on the
best-seller list and say, "I can't find Jubilees!" [laughter] "I can't
find Maccabees!" I just wanted to make sure they knew where those
sources were.

Darrell: Well, you know the
Maccabean works are in the Old Testament Apocrypha. Actually, I tell my
students that some of this is worth reading, because some of what we
know about the period feeding into the New Testament... most of what we
know about it, we know about it through this kind of material.

For example, the Maccabean books are about the Maccabean war fought in
167 and 164 B.C. And we would not have Judaism -- and we would not have
Judaism in part in the form in which we have it -- if it had not been
for the success of that war.

Mark: And our interpretation
of the New Testament is helped by an understanding of that history
because the Feast of Dedication -- that's mentioned, you know, in the
Gospel of John -- is rooted to that very war.

Darrell: Exactly right.

Mark: The deliverance that
they felt, that came -- and hence the feast of Hanukkah in modern
Jewish practice.

Darrell: Right.

Mark: So that historical
aspect is there.

Darrell: Not to mention the
whole relationship between Jews and Gentiles and why that's such a
sensitive issue in the first century. If you understand that what
Gentiles meant to many Jews in the centuries leading up to the time of
Christ was an attempt to really eat away and deny everything that it
was to be Jewish, you know including the desecration of the temple, the
denial of the Sabbath, the challenge to be circumcised, you know, not
caring about what food is eaten, that kind of thing.

All the compromise of what it meant to be Jewish. You would understand
why people are nervous about a community in which Jews and Gentiles are
brought together. And you would also understand how revolutionary the
reconciliation is that Jesus brings between these ethnic groups.

You know I found myself when I was young reading the New Testament,
saying, "Why is there all this stuff about Jews and Gentiles? That
doesn't seem very relevant." Well, it was extremely relevant in the
first century.

Mark: Go ahead Stephen.

Dr. Stephen Bramer: Just
before you leave, your material from Jubilees and everything...

Darrell: Yeah.

Stephen: I think the point we
want to make is that in the Old Testament there is resurrection, but
the type of resurrection, whether it is a bodily resurrection, is not
as clear.

Darrell: Exactly right.

Stephen: Certainly it is in
the New Testament.

Darrell: Exactly right.

Stephen: And you're
suggesting that this concept has been developing, so when we come to
the New Testament, bodily resurrection is something that people can
appreciate.

Darrell: Exactly.

Stephen: And expect.

Darrell: And in fact what I'm
saying is -- very well said -- because again, in class what I often do
is I will have people go to Daniel 12:1-2 and I'll say, "Read this. Now
tell me what this tells you about resurrection."

And the bright students in the class go, "Well it tells you that there
is a resurrection." And then our next question is, "Well, what else
does it tell you about resurrection?" And the class goes silent because
it doesn't tell you anything else about resurrection.

So then I say, "So how do we know that we are dealing with a bodily
resurrection?" Well they'll come to the New Testament and they will
look at the appearances and these kinds of clues. Yes. Now how do we
get from A to B? OK.

And what you do is when you see in this intertestamental period these
thoughts ,you understand that one of the things Jesus was commended for
by the Pharisees in the New Testament was his defense of resurrection.
All of a sudden you realize there is a point of contact there, and you
can see it in this intervening material. So it's a bridge in some
cases, conceptually.

Mark: Stephen, let me turn to
you. You mentioned it earlier in our conversation, but another
challenge in Christianity comes from the so-called Gnostic Gospels. As
you understand these writings that came two, three, four centuries
after the time of Christ, why are they called Gnostic and what have
these contributed to modern-day discussions?

Stephen: You know, I think
most of these documents have been discovered in Egypt. There are a
couple of dozen, actually, of the Gnostic Gospels.

You know Gnosticism comes from the belief that there is a knowledge
that a person needs to have in order to obtain salvation. There is some
sort of secret knowledge. Gnosticism involved a dualism between the
spirit and the body; that which was physical was evil. Yet you could
obtain salvation by this secret knowledge.

And I think we see in the New Testament, especially in some of John's
writings, a reaction to at least a proto-Gnosticism. It hasn't been
fully developed yet, but he's already beginning to react that the
physical body is not evil, and Christ was resurrected bodily, and that
to know the Lord Jesus Christ is where our salvation is.

Sometimes this is called, I think, even Gnostic Christianity. It
certainly is a breakaway from Christianity. There are a lot of things
that are similar about Christianity, but they actually deny a number of
the basic fundamentals, I believe, of Christianity as is developed even
in the Old Testament: the creation of the world by God himself, the
fact that God created man as a physical being that will be a complete
redemption in the future.

And yet there seems to be the view that this Gnosticism was perhaps the
correct Christianity, and they just lost out because they didn't win
the war, or they didn't get there politically. But I think we need to
take a look at this, and take a look at the material that is presented,
and realize that it is not in keeping with the Old Testament.

It's not in keeping with some of the essential statements of the New
Testament that seem to be foundational, ancient sayings. Philippians 2:
this is an early Christian hymn and they conflict with that. So it's
not that the Gnostics lost out because they didn't win the battle. They
lost out, I believe, because they were a heretical sect. And yet, it's
being emphasized these days that they give a great deal of background
to the New Testament.

Mark: Darell, anything you
want to add to that?

Darrell: Yeah, I think that
Steve's done a great job of summarizing this that Gnosticism is about
mystery. It's about the idea that God wasn't the creator but that there
were underling gods who did the creation, at that creation was flawed.
It was so flawed that it was irredeemable and therefore there wouldn't
be a physical dimension to resurrection.

So all these elements contribute in. And then what we see, and this is
interesting too because I think even with this area there is a way of
arguing without insisting that person adopt our presuppositions.

And it is what Steve also was alluding to. That is that if you look at
the doctrinal summaries that are encased within our New Testament -- or
our hymns that are encased within our New Testament, or the rites and
liturgy that is associated with the Lord's Supper and Baptism, these
three key areas that would involve teaching, that involve singing, that
involve the liturgy of what some people would call the sacraments...

Anyway, the point is that you put those three things together, all a
part of the basic worship of the church, you can see this core theology
that is being passed on. Because we are in a period in which the New
Testament as an organized body of material can't be appealed to because
it hasn't been written yet. So how do you pass on your theology before
there is a New Testament?

You know the Bible church, the Bible church, the Bible of the Bible
churches of the first century was the Old Testament. So how did you
pass on the theology? Well you did it through these summaries. You did
it through singing these hymns that had this content. You did it
through what you said at the baptism and at the Lord's Supper. And that
made key and clear what the core of the faith was.

And then you look at the Gnostic teaching and you put up against that
and you see those things don't match up at all. In fact, this stuff,
this Gnostic Christianity would never come out of the Judaism that fed
into Christianity and explains what Christianity's background is.

Mark: And I think that
historical thread is critical. Because alongside all of all of this
attack, suspicion, question about historic Christianity and especially
from the period of the Gnostic Gospels, paralleling this are some who
believe that the deity of Jesus Christ was not established until after
the time of Constantine and the Council of Nicea in the fourth century.

But as you mentioned Darell, as you go back to those statements, you
can work your way back and then back forward all the way back to New
Testament times. I mean how many years apart from Jesus do we have
these early sayings? And it's not time enough for legend to develop.

Darrell: Mmm hmm.

Mark: And so there is
historical verification and really without argument for the most part,
even in the early literature that they were wrong in those statements.

Darrell: Yes, there are two
issues here. The first is that if you look at the actual materials that
we have, our earliest writings where we have the statements come from
about the 50s. OK? That's within 20 years of the death of Christ, two
decades. People are still alive who experienced this.

But that isn't all. If you look at these doctrinal summaries which
allude to resurrection, what you've got to remember is that when Paul
issues this statement, he says, "You know, I pass on what I also
received." He's taking you back to the time of his own conversion. And
the time of his own conversion was in the 30s, probably within a couple
of years of Jesus' death.

What's interesting about that is that when Jesus appears to him and he
says -- and Paul asks the question, you know, "Who are you?" -- and he
informs him that he is the Lord. Paul has got to have enough theology
in place for what he has heard to be able to process that experience.
And that processing of that experience is matching the theology that he
then went out to preach.

Well, that is pulling you all the way back to the 30s, all the way back
to within a couple of years of the time of Jesus. And there is no time
for legend to develop in that period, unless you're going to argue that
the legend just kind of was an example of what we might call
spontaneous combustion. So that takes you very far back. So that's one
element of the equation that you're dealing with here.

The second part that is interesting is that when you start to line up
this core that we are talking about, it doesn't have all the detail
that Nicea does -- because Nicea is asking philosophical questions
about that doctrine that were raised afterwards in some cases and then
wording doctrine accordingly in the context Nicea emerged in. But you
do see in place all the elements that exist that take you to Nicea. And
that's really the point.

You know, the people on the other side are claiming "well really what
we had was a variety of Christianities. Everybody was claiming a
connection to Jesus and you had this form over here and then you had
this other form. And no one has an inherent claim to be closer to Jesus
and what he really taught."

Well, in fact we are saying that the traditional string that you can
trace that feeds into what is called orthodoxy today goes right out of
the very same decade of these events -- in contrast to what you can
show for this alternate strand that doesn't start showing up for real
until the second century.

Mark: And one of the ironies
of this is -- well, to me -- is that Gnosticism wants to deny the
humanity of Jesus.

Darrell: Mmm-hmm.

Mark: You know, the humanity
of the Christ. And it's almost like you can't have this both ways. You
know, if they are trying to deny the humanity of Christ, then there
must have been the argument for the deity of Christ to which they are
reacting, you know long before Nicea.

And so the question wasn't could he be divine, their question was could
he be human. And Stephen, you mentioned that the whole philosophy of
Gnosticism is that you can't intermix, you can't unite the physical
with the spiritual, the physical being viewed as evil, the spiritual
being viewed as good. But as early as the New Testament writings of
Paul, that the fullness of God dwelt in Christ in bodily form.

Stephen: Absolutely.

Mark: And in Colossians,
you've got a great argumentation that refutes the bifurcation of the
humanity in the deity of Christ. It argues not only for his fullness,
not only that he in essence is God dwelling in human flesh, but he had
a real death. He shed real blood, and then followed that by
resurrection, without which we obviously wouldn't have Christianity as
we have it.

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